mithriltabby | So I've been playing with social networking protocols... (Reply)

LiveJournal is already set up for FOAF (see the

ljfoaf community for more details); I’ve also started meddling with XFN as well. These are both ways of describing relationships between people on the Net. The information in these protocols is pretty much the same as you’d get if you looked at my User Info page, but in a machine-readable format. This is all part of the Semantic Web project for encoding knowledge (rather than just data) into the Web.

For example, my XFN profile allows me to list weregamer as a friend, as a colleague, and as someone I’ve met in the flesh. An application following that link could conclude that I’m willing to vouch for weregamer being a real person.

Let me know if you don’t want it to be easy for machines to figure out that we’re friends; I can easily take you out of my FOAF-knows group on LJ. All this does is facilitate hyperlinking; any personal information exposed is up to what you put in your own profile.